Kantar: WP going strong in Europe, Android still dominates

Global analytics company Kantar Worldpanel has released its latest global smartphone market share report for the 3-month period ending in March 2014. The data shows what's the distribution of Android, Windows Phone, iOS and BlackBerry in terms of overall market penetration in Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain (EU5) as well as in the US, China, Australia and Japan.

Starting with EU5, Windows Phone managed to gain 1.6 percent points year-over-year. Italy, which traditionally is a strong WP market, saw the largest growth by Microsoft's mobile OS with 13.9% (3.0 percent points more than the same period in 2013).

Windows Phone marks the least progress in Germany - 0.5 percent points up from March 2013. Android is doing quite well there though jumping from 73.6% to 77.0% share. Italy too is seeing a rise of Android with a 70.7% market share up from 62.5% last year.

Spain is another interesting market, where Android marks a decrease of 5.1 percent points from 93.7% in March 2013 down to 88.6% now . It's still a hard-to-believe dominance, when you consider that BlackBerry has 0% market share, Windows Phone scores 3.0%. Apple's iOS is trending in Spain with a of 4.5 percent points jump year-over-year. iOS now stands at 7.6% market share in the country.

When you add up the top 5 European markets, iOS makes a tiny progress of 0.1 percent points to 19.2%, while Android marks a jump of 1.5 percent points at the expense of BlackBerry. BlackBerry smartphones take just 1.1% of the EU5 market share with a grim forecast to continue dropping.

Dominic Sunnebo, a director at Kantar says that with the Lumia 520, Nokia managed to aggressively penetrate the low-end market, as it managed to capture first-time smartphone buyers and those switching from a Symbian device. "Now, we’re starting to see some really compelling competition at this end of the market from the likes of Motorola (with Moto G) and Samsung (heavily discounted S3 & mini models) eating into prime Nokia territory," he added.

By all accounts then, affordable Android smartphones and the recently announcedOnePlus One that's not really a mid-range smartphone are stealing Windows Phone's thunder.

In the US, Windows Phone has captured 5.3% of the market share on the 3-month period ending in March 2014 - a decrease of 0.3 percent points from the same period last year. Interestingly enough, iOS is also losing ground there with a noticeable decrease of 7.8 percent points. iOS now stands at 35.9% there, Windows Phone and BlackBerry take 5.3% and 0.7%, respectively.

The story is quite similar in China, where Android marks a jump with 8.1 percent points and now captures 80% of the smartphone market share. iOS is losing ground at a similar pace to the US market.

Thanks, I'll check those out. I do want to see WP do well, I just think Microsoft have very obviously given it a low priority and I don't see how this is supposed to inspire confidence. I found a website about upcoming Windows phones and there were o...